Shelving

The past two weeks the weather has been a lot more chilly and windy. It's only about 16 degrees outside. It's cold for being in July. Not nice for the people who are on vacation but I'm not complaining. The biggest problem now is to find an open restaurant where I can eat lunch. Most of them are closed. I will have to bring my own food most days, and my cooking abilities are not always that marvelous.

I have spent the past two weekends at home. There have been some things going on. I put new soil in most of the pots for my house plants, cleared some things from the attic to give to charity and went grocery shopping.

Last week I brought our new boss to the storage. I showed her around, explaining how we work and what issues we have with the electric shelving systems. I put her to work - she shelved some dissertations, while I shelved books from the old catalog. I'm saying we have been lucky with this recruitment. She definitely is not afraid of work.

This week we are only two staff members in the stacks, plus one stationed at the storage. It was decided earlier that we will not have any retrieval service at all starting this week and until August 10. It has already caused problems and people are wondering why on earth we have done something like this. It is extremely rare that our library (which is by far the biggest in the network) has no service during the summer. With the information we had in April, this was the right decision. But now when I know that we have four-five extra workers, we could have retrieved at least the books in the main library. We can't change it now, these extra workers have other projects to do.